They strolled to the Casino. With his accustomed flair for character
Ulick recognized in the girl something out of the usual run of
Americans. The charmless Yankee woman he had encountered to his
discomfiture from the moment his steamer left Havre. She was the "life
of the smoking-room"--on the French line ladies are permitted to invade
the ship's fumoir--and he soon avoided that type. But he found her on
the docks at New York and she fairly swarmed over the hotel, did this
same aggressive, conceited, too well-dressed female. In Paris he had
seen little of his ci-devant countrymen. He never visited the office
of his father, and the recurrent advent of fresh consuls and their
wives at the Embassy left him unmoved. His ideal of the American woman
was the figure of his mother: exquisitely tactful, and of a veiled
charm. And he enjoyed in Henry James the portraiture of the refined,
if somewhat anaemic order, of lovely spinsters. But the raw native who
gadded about Paris, confidently criticizing everything and everybody--
those women were repugnant to his sensibility. Daisy Miller was a
reticent aristocrat in comparison.
Perhaps it was the Old-World texture of her manner, perhaps it was a
brief sight of the exalted soul that peeped out of her timid eyes,
perhaps--! but what reason can a young man or a young woman give for
their first fugitive predilections? Ulick met Mona and liked her; Mona
saw Ulick and liked him. As Paul Bourget would have said, they then and
there "amalgamated their sublimes," which simply meant that they were
two birds limed by nascent love. The sublimities and the mingling might
come later.
But this youthful couple did not pin down their sensations to an
artistic formula. They chatted, laughed, walked, and when the Casino
was arrived at they sat on the Terrace and Ulick told them that the
spot made him homesick for Paris; Paris, his patrie psychique. Mona
incredulously smiled yet wondered; how could anyone prefer Paris to New
York? She had never been in Paris. Ulick lightly reproached Milton
for having kept such a sister locked up, as if in a gaol. Thereat, the
theological student chuckled. Mona was free as a swallow. She preferred
the company of her parents to that of the frivolous chits of her own
social circle. Ulick had known that the Miltons were well-to-do people
who lived without ostentation, a rapidly vanishing species of New
Yorkers. Again he looked at Mona, again their gaze collided. Her eyes
shone. They are the eyes of a rare soul, he commented to himself. And
how different the expression from the calm, objective gaze of Easter.
Toujours Easter!
"There comes Paul Godard! Lord! with that creature Blanche in his car.
Don't stare, Mona, please," begged her brother. "Don't be stupid," she
answered, "you dear old priest. I'll look. The woman won't hurt me."
Mona measured the handsome, bold dancer, over-dressed, bejewelled and
resplendent in a picture hat, who majestically moved up the terrace
followed by Paul and the maître-d'hôtel. Paul pretended not to see
Ulick, and Ulick turned the other way. He wasn't interested in Paul
or his concubines, though he still recalled with a sullen rage the
caddish behaviour of Godard the night he made Easter half-drunk; that,
and the inglorious hat episode he could never forgive nor forget. "So
he didn't sail, after all," he muttered. But if he was indifferent,
the young girl was not. "Is that the rich Mr. Godard I read of in the
newspapers?" she asked Ulick who couldn't repress a slight shudder
of disappointment. "She reads the newspapers like any other American
virgin, and she speaks of money! Hopeless, all these dove-eyed maidens,
with their profiles of a hawk; a sweet, domesticated hawk, a hawk all
the same, ready to swoop down--" "Oh let's go home brother," broke in
Mona, irrelevantly. She had sensitively noticed the inattention of her
new friend and she was wounded without giving herself any reason for
her slight feeling of resentment. They went away. Ulick accompanied
them to the gate at 72nd Street. Mona gave him a wan smile at parting.
Milton, as usual, was unaffectedly hearty. He was fond of Ulick and
had made a vow to save his soul from the eternal bonfire. She seemed
to like me at first, said Ulick after he left them, though she didn't
invite me to call. Oh Lord, I wonder what mischief Easter Brandès is up
to at this minute? Her name revived odious memories. Again that Paul
Godard. To the devil with the exasperated poodle. Ulick went to the
Utopian Club.
V
Mona Milton was what the French, with their feeling for nuance, would
call "fausse-maigre"; she gave an impression of slenderness which her
solidly-built figure contradicted. She was partial to draperies and
that, perhaps, created the illusion of diaphaneity. Her health was
excellent. Not even at the time when women are 'minions of the moon'
did she relapse into that forlorn flabbiness noticeable even to the
ordinary obtuse male. Her mother had reared her in the old-fashioned
way and had put the fear of God in her heart (read: human respect for
the polite conventions of a rapidly disintegrating social hierarchy).
But her father, who called himself agnostic, had quietly pooh-poohed
his wife's solicitousness regarding the little virtues. Hedges to be
vaulted if needs must, he told his daughter, the chief companion of
his long tramps through Central Park, when it was a green, delightful
retreat from the city's menacing encroachment. Truth is stranger
than morals, he also said. Mona loved the park. Every day saw her
reading or walking through the less-footed by-ways. For her, mornings
were mysteries. She would sit in the sun for hours, a book in her
lap, her eyes dreaming. Her sub-conscious life was struggling for
self-recognition. Her ego was transformed after puberty announced
itself. She was an orchestra of cells; the multiplicity of her egos
astonished, yet did not distress her. She accepted the new stream of
consciousness in her that had burst its barriers and painted over
her imagination a fresher, more beautiful world. Of physiology and
psychology she had more than the rudiments. Sex did not puzzle her,
only its cabined seclusion from the general current of daily life.
Her mother had been frank with her since she had reached the age of
curiousness; in turn Mona was frank with her father. She asked him
questions that she would not ask her mother and he answered them
unhesitatingly. He believed that insincerity cloaked a multitude of
stupidities. One day when she was hardly sixteen she said: "Papa, why
do I love dolls so much?" "The maternal instinct," he had replied. "Oh,
yes, anybody knows that, but why am I different from other girls?"
"Different, my dear?" "Yes, different. I haven't one friend who loves
dolls. They are fond of dogs but laugh at me when I dress and undress
my darling doll. Lydia Fuller says I'll be married at eighteen and have
twins at nineteen--maybe sooner," added Mona, pensively. The old man
only shook his head and resumed his Schopenhauer.
The rearing of the girl, withal superficial, covered a wide variety of
authors and subjects. She knew French fiction so well that she couldn't
become interested in the hypocritical half-way house of English-writing
novelists. What's the use of writing about life, she complained to
her mother, and leave life out of the story? The scabrous element in
Gallic light literature amused her, but she preferred Flaubert to Paul
de Kock, Balzac to Zola. Memoirs enchained her fancy. The utterances
and actions of real men and women appealed. Casanova, who has left
the world its most frank and complete autobiography, was for Mona as
is romance to other girls of her age; Casanova, Benvenuto Cellini and
the Memoirs of the Duc de Saint-Simon. Rabelais she dismissed and for
Benjamin Constant and Stendhal she only entertained mild respect.
She admired the electric energy of Julien Sorel and Mathilde de la
Môle, but they left her cold. As for the pessimists, Senacour, Amiel
and them that confide to diaries, their pen dipped in their own salty
tears, she spoke contemptuously. Weaklings, all. What if they did write
charmingly? She longed for virility; that spelled charm for her. The
more violent pages in the Old Testament, Shakespeare and Faust; but
she held the revelation of the New Testament in moderate esteem. Too
much oriental fatalism. Too much turning the "other cheek," to please
her. The person of Christ seemed apochryphal. Such a man couldn't exist
twenty-four hours without being killed on our murder-loving planet.
Notwithstanding all these contradictions in her undeveloped character,
Mona was far from being an "advanced" young woman; indeed, her
classmates at college had voted her desperately old-fashioned; worse--a
womanly woman. Secretly she wished that her soul could be like a jungle
at night, filled with the cries of monstrous sins. But it wasn't.
She continued to love her doll, not that she disliked cats and dogs and
birds, only that the doll, the simulacrum of the future child, touched
her to her innermost fibres. She had the brother-cult, yet she loved
no one, except her father, so much as the absurdly big French doll,
the last of a long line dating back to her babyhood, that slept with
her every night. The old folks were at first amused, then edified by
this stubborn reaction to a profound instinct. In time they became
accustomed to seeing a staring wax effigy on the pillow of their
daughter's couch, attired in a neat nightdress and lace cap. Ah, well!
had said the father, it is a premonitory symptom, yet she is happier
now, dear child, than she will be with her future husband. Considering
her self-effacing nature, the reply of his wife was rather tart: "If
you read less Schopenhauer you wouldn't be so prejudiced against my
sex. To hear you talk one might suppose that your married life had
been a vale of tears." To which the old man humbly and affectionately
replied: "Instead of a bed of roses, as it is," and surprised his
spouse by warmly kissing her.
They didn't forbid Mona the company of young men but she made no
attempt to meet anyone. Her brother was away most of the time at the
seminary and his friends were theological students, neuter persons she
evaded rather than despised. Voluntary eunuchs, enemies of the very
source of life, she felt uncomfortable in their presence, as she would
have been embarrassed if a hermaphrodite had been pointed out to her.
The unnatural was merely a mediaeval idea, but the anti-natural was to
be feared and avoided. She did not say this to her brother, who in her
eyes was a saint, but she said as much to her father who sympathised
with her. Another confusion in her mind was the degrading of the major
instinct of life--after hunger; Reproduction. If, as the Bible says,
fornication is a rank sin, why do a few words mumbled over a man and
woman by a clergyman or magistrate make it less a sin? It's the same
vile act isn't it, even in marriage? Her mother was more shocked at
her expression than at the idea which prompted it--an idea as old as
the hills. "But Mona, people don't think such things, much less speak
them." "They do mother. There isn't a girl in the world who hasn't had
this same thought, though she may keep it in the secret cabinet of
her mind." Her mother shook her head but didn't dare speak of sin, or
redemption or the holy sacrament of matrimony instituted by the Church
to bless the most animal of the functions, to lend it dignity, to
create a safeguard for the children, not to mention the fact that this
sacrament screens the shock and doubts and hesitations of pure-minded
girls, to whom physical union with a man would be otherwise repulsive.
No, this "theological bric-à-brac" as Mr. Milton called the tenets of
religion, his wife had been forbidden to speak of to her children.
Her son was to her a surprise, like a swan hatched from a brood of
ducklings, and now Mona was beginning to disquiet her. A good girl,
a loving dutiful daughter--nevertheless, disquieting because of her
absolutely natural attitude toward forbidden themes, so natural that
she often embarrassed her mother.
"Mother," she had abruptly exclaimed about this time, "Mother, I wonder
why brother is so inclined to piety. He should have been the girl, I
the boy. Mother--I am beginning to believe that something was wrong in
your marriage--" "Oh!" ejaculated the unhappy woman, who didn't know
what terrible speech would follow: "I firmly believe, you dear old
fraidcat Mother, that papa has never been unfaithful to you since you
two darling old sillies were married." Mrs. Milton refused to unbend
during an entire evening.